Peter Brooks argued in an op-ed yesterday that the entire defense budget needs to grow. A valid point, but it dodges the inescapable trade-offs we’ll face in any budget. We can’t buy everything, and what we do buy needs to be driven by a strategic assessment of the dangers we face. Saying “we need more” needs to be followed with a clear statement of what we need more of. If this isn’t addressed, the real issue will continue to fester.

Brooks offers three examples of how USN and USAF assets will be pivotal in three future threat scenarios: in Iran, in the Taiwan Straights, and in South Korea. In the Iran case, he argues that

Iran: An attack would likely be executed by U.S. air and sea strikes, not ground forces (but don’t count out special ops).

Air Force B-2 bombers and F-117, F-15 and F-16 strike fighters would drop GPS-guided JDAM and gravity bombs on Iranian air defenses, nuclear facilities and retaliatory forces such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Navy would chime in with carrier-based aviation and surface ships or submarines in the Persian Gulf and the North Arabian Sea, dropping bombs and firing cruise missiles at Iran’s nuclear sites, air defenses and naval assets.

The bolded section points to the flaw in Brooks’ strategic perspective. Iran demonstrated last summer that some of its most devestating relaliatory forces are not located within its borders and not wearing Iranian uniforms. US intelligence studies have indicated that Iranian retaliation would likely take the form of “…using oil as a weapon, attacking Americans in Iraq and elsewhere, unleashing Hezbollah or deploying other tactics.” Our attacks might not use masses of ground forces, but Iran would seek retaliation options that couldn’t be countered by our air and sea power.

Thus, we are reminded again of the futility of attempting to find a narrow military solution to a strategic problem with political, economic, social and religious dimensions. Within this context, does it make sense to put more of our finite resources into the areas where we already overmatch potential adversaries? Or does it make sense to invest in being able to counter the weak points that our adversaries would seek to exploit? More air and navel power won’t keep Iran from unleashing Hezbollah or inciting insurgent attacks against American forces in Iraq, and the cost of more air and navel power comes at the expense of developing the other capabilities that would address those threats.

So, in short, we may need more but without specifying what we need more of the assertion is useless. Just buying more of our old force structure doesn’t make sense in our geostrategic environment. Mitigating current retaliatory threats will require investments like more foreign aid to counter Hezbollah’s support base and more resilient economic systems to weather a sudden spike oil prices. Our armed forces are just one aspect of the solution set to national security threats and our best mitigation options require better integration between the military and everything else (from State to DHS to NGOs to transnational corporations).

Check out this demo of elastic lists (note the Tufte-insipired sparklines) looking at Nobel Prize data. First thing I did when I was playing around was see how many medicine, physics, chemistry and economics winners I could find from the Gap. In my five minutes, I only found one: Abdus Salam of Pakistan who won The Nobel Prize in Physics 1979. I’ve been thinking for a while that Nobel Prizes could be another metric for mapping the Core/Gap divide.

For folks wanting to build their own visualizations, check out IBM’s Many Eyes. Very hot. Upload your own dataset and then view the data through a nice selection of pre-made interactive visuals that can be published to a blog.

On a less breath-taking note, GeoHive has a nice aggregation of global statistics. All stuff you could have found elsewhere, just brought together in one place with a reasonably intuitive interface.

Finally, I expect folks are already familiar with Gapminder, so you’ll be as excited as I was to learn that Google has acquired Gapminder’s Trendanalyzer software. I expect to see some face-meltingly powerful services coming out of this.

George Friedman’s latest policy analysis examines the apparent contradiction of America’s continued rise over the past 60 years despite repeated military stalemates. From Korea to Cuba to Vietnam to Iran to Iraq, the US has been consumed in maneuvers that courted disaster and brought no decisive V-E or V-J Day victory. This same 60 year period, however, also saw conventional measures of American power continue to rise. On the surface of things, something doesn’t match up here.

Friedman introduces the military concept of a spoiling attack to explain this apparent contradiction. Such an attack seeks not to defeat the enemy but to disrupt enemy offensives. As Friedman puts it, “The success of the spoiling attack is not measured in term of enemy capitulation, but the degree to which it has forestalled successful enemy operations.” For one engaged in the spoiling attack itself, it can certainly feel as if one’s efforts are being wasted. It is only by looking at the broader context for the attack that one can see its value.

I’ve gradually learned this lesson in go. Novice players try to win everywhere at once. They want to win every fight without losing a single stone while also gaining influence over the entire board. They avoid fights that they can’t see winning, making it relatively easy to hem in their territory. One of my first teachers used an old proverb - “they’re just stones” - to encourage me to fight more. If you fight, even if you lose, you ought be able to force your opponent to give up influence elsewhere in order to win the fight. If you don’t fight, then you forfeit the initiative to your opponent and allow him to continue dictating the game’s flow. Even fighting a losing battle gives you an opportunity to make ko, allowing you to take the initiative in another theater of operations. Or, a losing battle could give you a ko threat, which could be used at a later date to win a ko fight elsewhere. Often, simply finding a way to make seki (a stalemate) can decide a game since it denies that region to either player, allowing strength in other areas to carry the day.

Thus, Friedman argues that American spoiling attacks of the past 60 years have successfully frustrated the strategic priorities of their primary enemies, allowing other dynamics (such as the vitality of the American economic or the structural weakness of the Soviet state) to carry the day. Whether the logic behind these spoiling attacks was intentional or the product of some strategic invisible hand is unclear, but that’s a separate issue.

Dracobs has a great post up examining the role of shaping in the DoD’s work in the Horn of Africa. While it makes sense that we’ll see SysAdmin functions growing inside DoD (with Joint Operational Concepts for shaping operations), ultimately this function needs to be moved outside of DoD. Otherwise we run the risk of continuing to let our diplomatic face to the world be driven by kinetic operations. Thus, while I heartily agree with Henrik’s recommendation that JFCOM and CIA personnel read the cited Foreign Affairs article, I’d include Dept of State and DHS personnel as well. After all, full-scale diplomacy ought to include, oh I dunno, diplomats?

This is the sort of post that makes Draconian Observations a must read. I just wish Henrik posted more often!

Today’s news offers three examples of the dynamics I discussed last week.

First, from the NYPost, an op-ed by Peter Brookes that uses the spectre of China deploying an aircraft carrier as a jumping off point to describe a larger Chinese power play. His ultimate conclusion:

…the U.S. Navy should be well aware of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s recent call for building a powerful navy, prepared “at any time” for conflict. Considering all this news, we’d be fools to take our current naval predominance for granted.

Along the way, Brookes compares China’s rising naval power to America’s Great White Fleet of the early 20th Century. While Brookes uses the comparison to imply that China may be making a provocative statement of its role as a global power, it could also be used as a case study in how an existing global naval power opted for implicit cooperation instead of confrontation. Examining England’s response to the rise of American power might lead to lessons quite different from the ones Brookes implies we ought to learn.

Moving to the Air Force, we have a statement from Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne warning that Russian and Chinese efforts to sell fifth-generation fighters provides another justification for the F-22 and the F-35 programs. Secretary Wynne emphasized that the Air Force requires 381 F-22s to counter the capabilities of these foreign aircraft. The Air Force has been holding to the 381 number, while the F-22 program is currently capped at 183 aircraft.

Finally, moving to the Army, we have an NYTimes article on the strain OEF and OIF rotation schedules place on unit readiness.

For decades, the Army has kept a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on round-the-clock alert, poised to respond to a crisis anywhere in 18 to 72 hours. Today, the so-called ready brigade is no longer so ready. Its soldiers are not fully trained, much of its equipment is elsewhere, and for the past two weeks the unit has been far from the cargo aircraft it would need in an emergency. Instead of waiting on standby, the First Brigade of the 82nd Airborne is deep in the swampy backwoods of this vast Army training installation, preparing to go to Iraq. Army officials concede that the unit is not capable of getting at least an initial force of several hundred to a war zone within 18 hours, a standard once considered inviolate.

The state of the 82nd is representative of the Army’s larger situation, with 22 of 43 active duty combat brigades currently deployed overseas.

Gen. Richard Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, told Congress in testimony on March 15 that with the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army does not have the time or the resources to prepare for most of the other missions it could potentially face.

This strain also includes a significant financial cost:

The 2007 Pentagon budget includes $17.1 billion to reset Army equipment, with a separate fund of $13.9 billion in emergency funds to replace or repair gear damaged in combat. Even so, units at home preparing to deploy are facing equipment shortages and have all but given up preparing for anything other than their next tour in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“We do have shortages in the nondeployed forces,” General Cody conceded in his unusually candid testimony to Congress. There were not enough vehicles, radios and night vision gear, and there are “spot shortages” in weapons, he said, noting that those units constituted the nation’s strategic reserve.

Reading these three articles, one almost feels as if he is moving between three different universes. When read in isolation, the first and second articles present what may seem to be a compelling case for increased funding for the Air Force and Navy. When one reads the third article, however, the Army’s need for increased funding becomes clear. Looking at these stories in aggregate, one can see the near-term operational needs of the Army threatening to crowd out long-term Air Force and Navy acquisition programs, while the Air Force and Navy push back to prevent this.

Picked up from Barnett, this WSJ story illustrates the continuing shift from acquiring the few and the expensive to the cheap and the many.

Key snip:

The revised supplemental budget proposes to take $923 million from Air Force aircraft programs, including $389 million for two JSF planes, $388 million for five Lockheed-made C-130 cargo planes, and $146 million for a new tilt-rotor aircraft made by Boeing and Textron Inc.’s Bell Helicopter unit. The Navy would lose $375 million for five EA-18 aircraft built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman Corp.

Funds are instead flowing towards more armor kits, transport vehicles, and personnel. Expect to see more op-eds from Air Force advocates talking about the need to recapitalize the force after 15 years of continuous operations. Folks will be looking for some way to stem the hemorrhaging.

David Ignatius offers an excellent but all too brief view of outgoing CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizad. I’ve copied the entire article below, with my comments interspersed.

An enduring image of Gen. John Abizaid is of him bounding from an armored Humvee in one of Baghdad’s toughest neighborhoods last summer and conversing with shopkeepers and imams who were dumbfounded to encounter a four-star general chatting with them in Arabic.

Abizaid, who retires today as Centcom commander, brought something special to the job. He was an Arab American who understood the region’s culture and spoke its language. But more than that, he was an intellectual who thought more deeply about the strategic issues involved in what he liked to call the “long war” than almost anyone else in the U.S. government.

“Not since Douglas MacArthur have we had a regional commander who understood so well the area for which he was responsible — its culture, history, language,” says Chuck Boyd, a retired four-star Air Force general who heads a group called Business Executives for National Security.

Abizaid likes giving interviews about as much as he likes going to the dentist. But he agreed to talk this week about some of the lessons he has learned as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since he took over at Central Command in July 2003.

How do you win a “long war” against Islamic extremism if your country has a short attention span? That’s an overarching concern for Abizaid regarding a conflict in which time — not troops, not tactics — is the true strategic resource. “The biggest problem we’ve got is lack of patience,” he says. “When we take upon ourselves the task of rebuilding shattered societies, we need not to be in a hurry. We need to be patient, but our patience is limited. That makes it difficult to accomplish our purposes.”

Past American strategists have commented on the challenges posed by this sort of foreign policy ADD. Albert Wohlstetter likened the challenge to that of staying thin after 30. No gadget or single heroic burst of effort will address the problem. There is no substitute for discipline and a clear focus on the long-range goals we want to achieve. This sort of strategic perspective flies in the face of what Henry Kissinger characterized as an American fixation on crisis response. Instead of viewing foreign policy as maintenance of an equilibrium, Kissinger argues that Americans tend to assume that once this or that crisis is solved, they’ll be able to return to some idealized past when international affairs required no energy or attention.

The response to this challenge must involve a clearly articulated and widely understood vision of our nation’s goals, leading us back to Ignatius and Abizaid:

Abizaid tried to stay focused on the long war — the battle against Islamic extremists who would kill a million Americans in an instant if they could — and to avoid taking actions in the Iraq theater that would make this larger conflict worse. That meant trying, wherever possible, to reduce the footprint of American occupation in Iraq and to push the Iraqis to solve their own problems.

“Insurgencies are not easily solved by foreign troops,” he warns. Only Iraqi security forces can stabilize the country in a lasting way, and America’s mission is training and advising those forces. That’s where patience comes in: America is four years into a process that, by Abizaid’s reading of counterinsurgency history, takes an average of about 11 years. On that timetable, less than halfway through, he thinks the United States is doing okay in Iraq — assuming it has the patience to finish the mission.

Abizaid won’t talk, even in his last week on the job, about the political debate that has swirled in Washington during his final months about whether to “surge” additional troops into Iraq. But it’s clear from his public statements that he regards the number of troops as a tactical matter. The essential ingredient for victory is something different — a comprehensive strategy that draws together all the resources of the U.S. government and that has enough public support to endure from election to election and administration to administration.

That we currently lack such a comprehensive strategy is a clear consequence of letting grand strategy drift during the 1990s.

“Military power solves about 20 percent of your problem in the region,” he said in a speech at Harvard in November. “The rest of it needs to be diplomatic, economic, political.”

This need for a comprehensive strategy — and for a new national security structure that can make it work — is the second big lesson for Abizaid. Facing a global communist adversary in 1947, the United States created institutions that could coordinate all the different strands of policy, and Abizaid argues that we need a 1947-style reform now. “There are too many bureaucratic impediments,” he says. It’s too hard, in Abizaid’s view, to balance elements that should be working together but are instead competing — State vs. Defense, legislative vs. executive, Iraqis vs. Americans, America vs. its allies.

This excellent point speaks to the realistic scope of effective reform. Without this magnitude of change, we’re left with a host of non-cooperative centers of gravity. One example of this is our increasingly militarized foreign policy, which arose in large part because our other elements of national power have been even slower to adapt that DoD. Mountainrunner has an excellent examination of these dynamics at work in Africa.

Abizaid says that after retirement, he wants to join in a public debate about how to reform a national security system that hasn’t worked well enough in Iraq. It’s said that he turned down a chance to be director of national intelligence, a job that would have suited his strategic vision. He’s thinking about writing a book, so long as a publisher doesn’t demand the kind of kiss-and-tell memoir that makes him uncomfortable. But if the war against Islamic extremism lasts as long as Abizaid predicts, it’s hard to think that he won’t be back in this fray again, next time as a civilian.

Indeed.

Lind channels Tufte as he takes shots at the role of PowerPoint in the American military:

The briefing format was devised to use form to conceal a lack of substance. PowerPoint, by reducing everything to bullets, goes one better. It makes coherent thought impossible. Bulletizing effectively makes every point equal in importance, which prevents any train of logic from developing. Thoughts are presented like so many horse apples, spread randomly on the road. After several hundred PowerPoint slides, the brains of all in attendance are in any case reduced to mush.

Discussions of PowerPoint have become a bit of a theme here, so I’ve added a “PowerPoint” category. It provides an easy way to quickly look back on all previous posts and discussions on the subject.

Another example of the kind of technology the SysAdmin mission requires, this time from the MITRE Corporation.

LocalEyes is an easy-to-use, low-cost cell phone application. It allows citizens in communities throughout the world to report criminal and terrorist activities without revealing their identities. Citizens can also use it to send data reports to authorities on public safety issues such as missing manhole covers, new pot holes, gas leaks, breaks in dams, and downed power lines.

Note the implicit recognition that disaster response missions, stabilization missions and COIN missions share the need to empower the population to securely share information. In this case, cell phones are used to aggregate information.

LocalEyes is a machine-to-machine data-driven system, so it doesn’t need language translation. A citizen need only push a few buttons to send data about the “what,” “where,” and “when” of a sighting to a collection database. For example, if the sighting is a cache of AK-47 rifles, the citizen turns on LocalEyes and selects an image that’s an exact match or is similar to an AK-47, and types in the location. Photos and text can be added to the report as attachments. The citizen now pushes a button to send the LocalEyes report, along with a time stamp, to the collection database.

The elegance of this approach stems from its use of existing cell infrastructure (meaning that it doesn’t have to wait for further infrastructure investment), and the ability to tailor it to different cultures.

LocalEyes can be set up by just about anyone in any culture. The local administrator just creates a checklist of things he or she wants LocalEyes to do. For example, to allow people to attach photos, a check mark is placed next to that option on the configuration list. Images and text that fit with the local culture are selected by the administrator. When the location-based version of LocalEyes is completed, it can be automatically pushed out to the cell phone users.

Of course, in order to know which images and text fit the local culture, one would need to have a deep understanding of that culture… leading us back to the role of anthropologists (a topic Mark recently discussed and I’ve posted on in the past).

As examples of SysAdmin investments accumulate, the distinction between them and legacy Leviathan investments becomes clearer. This disrupts the gravy train of massive, decade-long procurement programs that have become the big contractors’ specialty. Keep your eyes out for the shifting responses as this disruption grows.

The Sunday Times ran a story yesterday stating that Brigadier General Ali Reza Asgari had been spying for the West since 2003 before defecting last month.

This story has been on my radar since last week, thanks to the Belmont Club’s post.

Given Asgari’s long ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as his service as an aide to the Iranian defense minister, the prospect of what he could be revealing to Western intelligence must be causing some serious hearburn in Iran.